Foxball bolder than Norvball, by a skosh

Turner pretty clearly gave up at the end of overtime…By taking an instant timeout, Turner could have forced the Broncos to run another play to try to run the clock down, and if anyone is aware of what can happen with an extra snap before a field goal attempt, it’s the Chargers…The Chargers ran Ryan Mathews and Mike Tolbert on three consecutive plays for no net gain, and Novak promptly failed to put his 52-yarder through the uprights. That’s the exact sort of overtime behavior Brian Burke noted in his research into why Mike Smith’s fourth-and-1 decision was correct; essentially, coaches clam up in overtime when they get anywhere near a reasonable field goal. And it’s also worth noting that the Broncos passed up two fourth-and-1 opportunities with their excellent running game and promptly let the Chargers drive down the field on them … only to get lucky when the Chargers gave up and then missed their field goal.

Oh, I see - he&#8217s just saying that with a Broncos miss, it would have been the difference between getting the ball back with 30 seconds left, and over a minute left. To play for the win instead of a tie.

Posted by tunesmith on 2011-11-28 20:08:05

Yeah, that&#8217s not the first time I&#8217ve seen someone make that point. I think that Jeff Triplette ref screwed up a lot of the columnists maybe. It was sudden death, it doesn&#8217t matter.

Posted by tunesmith on 2011-11-28 19:46:45

Why would that have forced the Broncos to run another play to run more time off the clock? In OT with such a close field goal attempt why in the world would they try to run more time off the clock? It&#8217s sudden death. We would have just kicked the FG right then with no concern over how much time was remaining. Sure a missed chip shot FG would have sucked and in that scenario we would prefer the least amount of time left for them to try to score (obviously) but that still would not have forced our hand to run more time off the clock.